I was watching Norm MacDonald's podcast on YouTube--his interview with Martin Mull. Mull appeared on Norman Lear's Mary Hartman, Mart Hartman, [sic] Fernwood Tonight and America Tonight, so they got on the subject of All in the Family. MacDonald noted that Archie Bunker was objectively more likable than Meathead. He said he had racist relatives who liked the show. I had racist grandparents who liked it, too.
It bothered me even as a kid how anti-working class the show was. Why were all the working class characters dumb racists? Why weren't Meathead and Gloria pro-union?
Meathead took a number of views that weren't exactly liberal. He opposed a group obviously based on the Jewish Defense League only on the grounds of non-violence, not because the JDL was openly racist. When a corporation mistakenly sent money to Edith, he and Gloria were anxious to return it.
This was what went wrong with the Democrats. They started seeing the working class as the enemy and went for corporate money. They became "social liberals" rather that actual liberals, not that they were ever all that socially liberal.
They got away with it for years. Workers still voted Democrat because the Republicans were always slightly worse. Trump showed how bad the Democrats had gotten by showing how little he had to offer working people to get their support.
Charles Schumer, meanwhile announced that "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin."
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